Franjo Hanaman (June 30, 1878 – January 23, 1941) was a Croatian inventor, engineer, and chemist, who gained world recognition for inventing the world's first applied electric light-bulb with a metal filament (

tungsten Tungsten, or wolfram, is a chemical element with the symbol W and atomic number 74. Tungsten is a rare metal found naturally on Earth almost exclusively as compounds with other elements. It was identified as a new element in 1781 and first isol ...

) with his assistant Alexander Just, independently of his contemporaries. Franjo Hanaman was born in the village of

Drenovci Drenovci ( hu, Drenóc, german: Drenowitz) is a village and municipality in the Vukovar-Syrmia County in Croatia. The municipality is part of Slavonia. Population According to the 2011 census, there are 5,174 inhabitants, in the following se ...

Slavonia Slavonia (; hr, Slavonija) is, with Dalmatia, Croatia proper, and Istria, one of the four historical regions of Croatia. Taking up the east of the country, it roughly corresponds with five Croatian counties: Brod-Posavina, Osijek-Baran ...

(at the time Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia,

Austria-Hungary Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of ...

) to a Croatian family as a second child of father Gjuro Hanaman and Emilija Mandušić. Just and Hanaman were granted the Hungarian Patent #34541 on December 13, 1904 in

Budapest Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...

. His invention of tungsten filament was also applied in improving early diodes and

triode A triode is an electronic amplifying vacuum tube (or ''valve'' in British English) consisting of three electrodes inside an evacuated glass envelope: a heated filament or cathode, a grid, and a plate (anode). Developed from Lee De Forest's ...

He died in

Zagreb Zagreb ( , , , ) is the capital and largest city of Croatia. It is in the northwest of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the Medvednica mountain. Zagreb stands near the international border between Croatia and Slov ...

(at the time

Kingdom of Yugoslavia The Kingdom of Yugoslavia ( sh-Latn-Cyrl, separator=" / ", Kraljevina Jugoslavija, Краљевина Југославија; sl, Kraljevina Jugoslavija) was a state in Southeast and Central Europe that existed from 1918 until 1941. From 1918 ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hannaman, Franjo 1878 births 1941 deaths People from Drenovci Croatian inventors Electrical engineers Croatian chemists Austro-Hungarian scientists Burials at Mirogoj Cemetery Engineers from Zagreb